Phantom

by Steve Berman

  “I remember a lot of things that folks don’t think I should be able to.”

  “It seems to me,” Gladys said, interrupting, “that there’s a lot more starlings involved than ever could have been on your place to begin with. They’re in every house and barn for twenty miles around.”

  “It’s airborne,” Erik said, and she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard. “Contagious. Spreads by spores.”

  “So what about that silo?” she said desperately.

  “It’ll have to come down,” Angela said, pulling the plug on the sink. “It’s still burning inside.”

  “Hell.”

  “Yeah. Do you have any idea how much they charge for that kind of thing? To hire someone who’ll make sure that it won’t hit the house . . . ” Angela shook her head, tossed the dishtowel on the counter.

  “Why’d they do it?” Erik said, lurching up to look out the window to where the barn had been—no more prophecy voice, just the sad voice of the boy she’d once kissed at a school dance. “Fuck. We had it contained, if they would have left it alone.”

  “It couldn’t last forever,” Angela said. “Wood rots.”

  “Still. We had decades yet to figure something out, if the fuckers hadn’t burned it.”

  “It was arson, then?” Gladys asked, fascinated and appalled.

  “The police don’t say so,” Angela said.

  “The police don’t know shit.” Erik settled back into his chair in obvious pain.

  The temperature dropped sharply during the night. Barnyard mud scabbed over with ice. Tomatoes and parsley plants and jewelweeds and asters died in silence.

  Some of the starlings who hadn’t found shelter died too. But only a handful.

  When the sun rose, they were hungry again. Even in a house with central heating, night meant a lot of calories burnt. Another handful of starlings got too close to humans, cats, lit stoves, the fumes of Teflon pans cooking bacon. But only a handful.

  Martin Dane left his mom and brothers in the kitchen, trying to get their spoons from their bowls to their mouths fast enough to avoid the darting beaks, and hiked into the woods for peace. Out at the tree stand he could see his breath, but the only birds around were some blue jays being angry at something far away.

  He hadn’t been there long when the leaves crunched below and Jake Marshall appeared with a cup of coffee and a paper sack sagging with burgers.

  “Got a healthy breakfast there,” Martin said, as Jake bit into a sandwich oozing safety-orange cheese.

  Jake swallowed. “Might as well enjoy them while I can. Mae Norris says that if she can’t get the birds cleared out of the building in another day or two, she’s going to have to shut down before the Health Department fines her up the ass and the main office yanks her franchise.”

  “Didn’t she get an exterminator?”

  “She did, first day, but they won’t touch the poison. And when the dude tried to fumigate, they just cleared out and then came back as soon as it was safe.” He opened the bag again. “You want one?”

  Martin nodded, and they ate in silence for a while. The sun began to take the frost off the world; a nuthatch landed on a nearby branch and they both startled at the sound of wings before they saw what it was.

  “Last night, those fuckers actually managed to chase Badger away from his food dish and ate all the kibble,” Jake said. “You know Badger and food. I think he hated it worse than when I had him neutered.”

  “He let a bunch of little birds like that keep him out of the food dish?”

  “Every time he tried to get a bite they pecked his snout. Gave him a nosebleed, and now he’s afraid of them.”

  Martin snorted.

  “Yeah, well, regardless, I’m not going to let him starve to death. I finally got them all cleared out of the bathroom and fed him in there with the door closed. Took me an hour to clear one goddamn room.” He sipped his coffee. “We gotta figure something out. It can’t go on like this very long.”

  “My grandma says that all this shit is punishment on us for burning the Conrads’ barn down.”

  “Your grandma’s a nutcase. With all due respect, dude.”

  “Yeah, but . . . ”

  “First of all, everyone at the firehouse agrees, it was an electrical fire. The cops say so, too. Second, I distinctly remember your grandma saying that the fire was punishment on them for all that weird shit Erik does, so which is it?”

  “I guess it could be both.”

  The shriek of a thousand voices rose suddenly from the direction of the road. Jake and Martin abandoned the remaining food and climbed out of the tree so fast that they might almost have jumped.

  By the time they reached the nearest field, it had grown louder. Over the line of the trees, a great black mass pulsed like a heart, rippled, spread so that they could see the sky beyond, reconcentrated. Then the flock made a strange, almost percussive sound and streamed away to the east.

  “That was over the Conrad’s place,” Martin said. Jake nodded. They ran for home.

  Gladys looked out the Conrad’s kitchen window. “That’s Jake Marshall’s truck pulling in,” she told Angela. “He’s got Martin with him.”

  “Sure, everybody shows up now.” Angela said, not looking up from Erik’s body. “Vultures.”

  “Be fair. Jake’s a good kid. He was at the fire.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just . . . ”

  Gladys nodded, and when Martin and Jake reached the door she sent them to tell Joe that she’d be late for her shift.

  “It’s Aunt Mary’s fault,” Angela said as soon as they were gone. “She’s a registered nurse, you’d think she’d have some goddamn sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She came over to help change Erik’s bandages, and she went and told him that people with bad burns can die from fluid in their lungs.”

  Every few seconds a starling would flutter in from the top of the bookshelf or the back of a nearby chair and try to land on his face, and Angela would flail at it angrily, and it would fly away again.

  “I saw on the news last night that they’re having trouble with starlings all the way in Depew now. Do you think it’s getting worse?”

  “Erik thought it was. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? When it was in the wood, it could only move so fast. But now it’s airborne . . . ”

  “I heard Daniel Buck is talking about hiring one of those guys with a falcon to go at them.”

  “You think you can talk to him?”

  “I’d better, I guess.”

  SHE HEARS MUSIC UP ABOVE

  F. Brett Cox

  At Exit 10 Olivia asks Peter how they’re doing on gas. He checks the gauge and says they’d probably better stop. She asks not because she has any real sense of how long it’s been since they last filled the tank but because she wants him to stop talking. He had begun to outline a theory of the fundamental differences between living on the coast, where they are both from, and living in the mountains, where they are now, and suddenly, with a certainty that startles her, Olivia realizes that, at the moment, she just does not want to hear any theories.

  They take the exit and stop at the first convenience store. Peter suggests that they drive into the town whose name was at the top of the exit sign and is, according to the smaller sign by the convenience store, only a quarter-mile down the road. Olivia nods and looks out the car window, vaguely dissatisfied that he’s still talking.

  As they drive by the village common they see a group of people with musical instruments gathering on a small stage with a shell over it, and others arranging themselves in front of the stage on collapsible lawn chairs and blankets and on the lawn itself. Peter asks if they should stop, and Olivia says sure. He pulls over and parks. Olivia gets out of the car and immediately hears music. Not from the bandstand where the musicians are still gathering, and not from the radio in the car, and not even inside her own head. A woman’s voice, a steady pulling melody as if a magnet had started singing. Not
in her head but somewhere up above.

  Life since college has been a mixed bag for Peter. He failed to parlay his undergraduate degree in computer science into one of the cyber-fortunes that at one time seemed to hang like ripe clusters of virtual fruit, ready for the picking; the fact that his was not the only such disappointment was little comfort. A return to school and a Master of Liberal Studies was intellectually fulfilling but unprofitable. A semi-random but wholly desperate application to a small university on the Massachusetts shore yielded a job in the registrar’s office, where, to his surprise, he has not only remained, but advanced. His position as Registrar is relatively safe from economic fluctuations—students may enroll in greater or lesser numbers, but someone has to be there to register them—and he is good at it, keeping both faculty and administration content with his ability to arrange times and locations that flow smoothly and steadily through the academic day. A month after he started he met Olivia, two doors down in Human Resources. They have been together ever since. His parents like her; her parents are dead. Recently he has considered returning to his roots and enrolling in the college’s online graduate program in Information Assurance, which he can do while continuing full-time in this safe and steady job with a retirement fund in which, three years hence, he will be fully vested. He and Olivia can afford to take weekend excursions such as their present trip into the mountains of central Vermont.

  But next year he will turn forty, and while he has no reasonable grounds for complaint, while he understands completely that his best years lie ahead of him, he sometimes wonders what those years could possibly contain that would be at all different from right now. It is a perilous sequence of thoughts: things are fine now, but things could always be better, but how likely is that, and would it be a bad thing if they weren’t, and are things indeed fine? Are they really? Olivia loves him, he is certain, but they don’t talk like they used to. She is unfailingly pleasant and frequently passionate, and when he asks her how she is, her answers are always positive. Yet there are times when the pleasantries seem reflexive, the passion rehearsed, the answers slow in coming and brief when they arrive. There are nights when he cannot sleep and his present and his future churn within him like small sharks circling dead and bloody meat.

  He looks at Olivia as they sit on a wood-and-iron bench to the left of the bandstand, behind the bulk of the crowd but still close to the stage. Her face is ever so slightly heavier than it used to be; he is as struck by her pale, unfreckled skin and the red silk of her hair as he was when they first met. Once, early in their relationship, he called her his Celtic beauty, but she gave him a dubious look and he never called her that again.

  As the band begins to tune up he resumes the conversation they had been having before they turned off the interstate. He repeats that coastal areas, by definition, offer easy access; people can drift in and out at will and with little notice. It’s easy to enter and easy to exit. If you’re in the mountains, though, you have to make an effort to get there, and you have to make an effort to leave. Thus the shifting demographics of their college town by the sea, as opposed to the constants of northern New England: Yankees firmly planted for centuries; ex-hippies not far removed from their ex-communes; people who came for a skiing vacation and never left. Olivia tells him that the coast is home to plenty of old things and looks intently at a row of houses on the other side of the common.

  Olivia’s father died when she was in high school, killed in a collision not five miles from their tidewater Virginia home. It was the other driver’s fault. Her mother held up brilliantly during the funeral and throughout the five years that followed before the tumor in her left breast metastasized. Olivia’s father’s death taught her that terrible things can happen for absolutely no reason, and her mother’s final illness taught her that knowing the reason doesn’t make any difference. Her parents loved her and she loved them with no significant complaints. Each loss was like a layer being peeled away from her, leaving raw and exposed the dizzy uncertainty of being alone in the world and the guilt she felt because she didn’t miss them more than she did. When she met Peter she could feel a layer being added back on, slowly and carefully. It felt wonderful to begin with, and then it felt good, and lately it has not felt any particular way at all.

  The band on the common begins their first song, which she does not exactly recognize—some old American standard or other. The sound of the band is white noise to the music that continues to hover above her, like the wash of the floor fan Peter runs to help him sleep at night but which never completely obliterates the sounds of the night: the furnace groaning on, a neighbor’s dog barking, a car speeding away into the surrounding darkness. It does not occur to her to ask Peter if he hears this music; she knows she is the only one who can. The woman’s voice draws Olivia’s attention across the grass, wilted in the breezeless July heat, past the swing set on which a boy and a girl swoop past each other like scissors clicking open and shut, toward the middle house in the row of three that stand on the other side of the common.

  Olivia knows she will cross the common and enter the house, but she does not want to just yet. She is thirsty. She looks behind her and sees a small strip shopping center, one unit of which is a grocery store. She tells Peter she is going to get something to drink and leaves him sitting on the bench.

  The members of the band, like the members of the audience, are mostly older people, although there are a scattering of men and women Peter’s age and younger. The musicians all wear green polo shirts and khaki pants. Each shirt has a left breast pocket bearing some kind of logo patch Peter doesn’t recognize. The musicians are all wearing sunglasses, cheap knockoff mirrorshades that you can buy for a dollar at a roadside flea market. Their playing is surprisingly smooth, much better than Peter had expected, with only a hint of the dissonance of a group of musicians that has a limited amount of time to rehearse. The songs they play—“In the Good Old Summertime,” “The Sidewalks of New York,” “A Bicycle Built for Two”—could have come from a songbook a century old, and when Peter sees a page fall from the music stand of one of the trombone players, he thinks it looks yellowed, tattered. He is suddenly aware of the very old people sitting closest to the band, and the younger families sitting farther away, and the children running freely as their parents listen to the music, and he has the same feeling he has at night when he can’t sleep and the sharks are circling. He tries to push it aside, assigns the twinge of wrongness he feels to other things: his mild dread of the tiresome drive back to Massachusetts, his continued indecision about returning to graduate school. The band is now playing “The Tennessee Waltz,” and he thinks first of his grandparents dancing at his parents’ twentieth anniversary party, and then of the story his mother had told him of his great-grandmother who died giving birth to her ninth child, and her second husband who died of an infected blister on his heel. He taps out the beat of the music on the arm of the bench; soon he is hitting the iron with the heel of his hand on the downbeat, one two three one two three, and he has to stop before he injures his hand. He does not understand his mounting anxiety; he has no explanation for why this tranquil place and this innocuous music, this idyllic summer day, fill his thoughts with the deaths of people he never knew. The late afternoon sun dips behind the maple tree that rises from the middle of the common. He feels a sudden chill and does not understand that either. He wonders what is taking Olivia so long.

  The temperature in the grocery store is at least twenty degrees cooler than the temperature outside. When Olivia first arrived in Massachusetts from Virginia, many people asked how she could stand the southern heat, secure in their New England conviction that anything south of Maryland is the tropics. Rather than give them a geography lesson, she replied that yes, the South was hot, but everything was air conditioned—unlike New England, where air conditioning seemed largely confined to movie theaters and grocery stores.

  The music above her is coming from speakers in the ceiling; the other voice she left on the com
mon.

  The glass doors of the refrigerated wall cases are fogged; she opens one, pulls out a plastic bottle of water. She doesn’t recognize the brand, but there’s a strawberry on the label. She is the only customer in the store. The woman at the cash register, who must weigh at least three hundred pounds, has enormous, dilated eyes; Olivia wonders if she’s an addict on some kind of halfway house work release. Or do drugs make your pupils small? She used to know. There are many things she has forgotten and she would like to remember them. She pays for her bottle of water and walks out into the steady heat and diminishing afternoon light.

  She crosses back to the common, where Peter sits on the bench, transfixed by the band. The music above her returns and grows stronger as she walks across the grass. Peter does not seem to notice her return. The boy on the swing is gone but his swing still moves; the girl’s twig-thin legs stretch out from her thickly piled skirt as she pushes herself incrementally higher. Olivia walks past her, drinking the strawberry water. The boy’s empty swing continues to rise. The music from the band recedes and the song above her grows stronger as she climbs the front steps of the middle house.

  Peter is starting to panic. The other people on the common sit tranquilly listening to the band, but the dying notes of “The Tennessee Waltz” elicit images of a septic world where babies are fatal and blisters kill, and the crowd’s polite applause conjures a vision of his own sterile deathbed. The afternoon light is starting to fade. The band director, who is notably younger than most of the rest of the musicians, takes off his sunglasses and wipes them on the hem of his shirt. He turns to the audience to announce the final song, and Peter is amazed at the size and darkness of his eyes, almost as if he still wore his sunglasses. The band director turns back to his musicians and raises his baton, and as the band launches into “The Stars and Stripes Forever” Peter looks across the common and sees someone on the steps of the middle house. A flash of white, a mist of red. Olivia? He looks again and this time clearly sees her open the door and enter the house. He rises from the bench and heads across the common; by the time he passes the empty, motionless swing set, he is running.